I truly, deeply despise AI Art
I think what truly offends me the most about AI Art is how it takes something that is supposed to be incredibly meritocratic and turns it, essentially, into fast food consumerist garbage. It is the reduction of one of the truly special and awe-inspiring aspects of humanity into what is essentially pure trash.
What is the point of AI Art? What problem does it solve? So far, the only thing it appears to do is let grifters on Instagram trick people into believing they are incredible artists (while using actual artists when prompting the AI for images), and eventually directly threaten the livelihoods of artists and destroy the very idea of art as a career. No, prole, you do not get to enjoy making a living in Capitalism, now writhe like a worm under the boot of big tech.
All that for... what, making a fun toy for people to play with?
Let me be perfectly clear: AI Art is an affront to humanity. I am not saying this just as an artist who wanted to make a living off of his work - I've already accepted that careers and jobs aren't static.
No, there's something much more destructive going on here, something that makes me deeply uncomfortable about it. I genuinely believe we're on the verge of permanently losing a fundamental part of what it means to be human, here. Consider just for a second all of the infinite complexities that go into a piece of art, like how the artist has studied, their upbringing, their own personal experiences and circumstances that caused them to develop their skills in a particular way. All these things combined are result into a truly unique expression of individuality that still allows us to connect to others through it. In a way, you are sharing a truly intimate act when you show someone your art.
It's beautiful, isn't it? Too bad, because all that complexity and individuality is now going to be bulldozed and replaced by a significantly simpler dozen or so words you can type in a text box.
Consider the implications for a moment. There will come a point when you see an incredible digital painting that would've taken an artist an entire lifetime of drawing to achieve, and you simply won't give a shit. And I don't mean in the usual way that you look at an amazing piece of art and then move on with your life - no. You're not going to give a shit because you won't even consider if it was made by a human.
People will stop thinking incredible art can be attributed to humans as a default. Why would you? After all, we are going to be flooded with an endless torrent of images that are completely meaningless to everyone except the prompter himself. Sharing your "art" will become the equivalent of talking about your dreams with others.
All of this without mentioning the fact that painting as a career is destined to, for the first time in history, be well and truly eliminated. AI tech didn't come for the menial labor first as we predicted, nor the blue collar jobs that were meant to come after that. No, it went straight for the jugular of creatives. Soon, millions of artists will find themselves unemployable as their skills will become, if not utterly useless, rarely sought after. Why would a large entertainment company pay a real human being when MidJourney can create professional-grade concept art or illustrations in 5 seconds?
It's legitimately one of the most disturbing inventions that has ever been created. My doomerism towards humanity always had a sense of irony to it, but AI Art has removed that entirely.
Frank Herbert was fucking right, we need a Butlerian Jihad and we need it now.
it takes something that is supposed to be incredibly meritocratic and turns it, essentially, into fast food consumerist garbage
Sorry dude this happened long before AI art
Andy Warhol, the Rococo movement... I'm sure there was a monk doing illuminated manuscripts who was taking kickbacks on the side at one point
Not the same thing at all. There's still some level of technical skill required for the production of the designs of Rococo and Pop Art.
You misunderstood my point. Art is meritocratic in the sense that you can only get better at it if you actually do it and practice. It's a skill that needs to be nurtured. If you want to get Bouguereau level good in terms of technical skill, you need to dedicate a lifetime to improvement.
is a realistic painting better than an abstract one? What if the abstract one was made after 40 years of working?
Time is what makes good art? One can be provably better than another? And this is a good thing to you?
Time invested can absolutely give things value, yes. I would expect my fellow Marxists to understand something like that.
I don't believe in the contemporary reductionism of art as a purely emotional experience. There is technique and skill involved in it just as there is emotion and meaning, but it is the development of that technique that makes an artist truly unique. My realism is completely different from your realism, and there is beauty in that difference.
Are you going to argue that technical skill is not valuable at all? That we should all draw like toddlers because, fuck it, who cares? That understanding color theory or anatomy or perspective or rendering doesn't give you a more in-depth comprehension of what it is you're actually doing on the page or the canvas?
People were probably saying the same thing during any revolution in the production of art. I’m sure when the ability to reproduce prints on an industrial scale came around people said the same.
To me it’s just another tool, someone out there can use it to make something interesting and worthwhile I’m sure. It’s actually kinda cool that people with no ability can mess around with trying to make shitty art now.
Will it be used for evil? Yep. Most things that exist can be used for good or evil ends, and under capitalism it’s usually the latter. I’m sure it’ll lead to a loss of work for a lot of digital artists that work for media sites and stuff, but I’m gonna go out on a limb and guess those jobs were precarious as fuck and not particularly well remunerated to begin with.
Some people were concerned that photography would kill portrait paintjng which turned out not to really be the case. Lots of people said the same thing about movies killing books, or TV killing movies, and so forth, all of which turned out not to happen.
That said, I think the better analogy is with the industrial revolution and mass manufacturing displacing artisanal production for most goods. Trade guilds were very concerned that machines would replace their crafts entirely, and there was a lot of disruption in the short term but in the long term most artisanal production methods were preserved where they held artistic or aesthetic merit.
But, as with any automation debate, it all comes back to how capitalism turns utopian technologies into dystopian technologies. I think this debate would be far different if no artists were facing destitution and homelessness because of AI art.
:rage-cry: nooo you can't just eliminate the tyranny of the hand we need barriers to keep the riffraff from expressing themselves noooo
:gigachad-hd: cool picture
How is it not meritocratic? You practice, you get better. No two ways around it.
"This art is better than THAT art! Its objectively better because the artist was a higher level!"
I never said you should compare your art with others' art in that way. You practice art and get better at it as a method of personal growth.
The word "meritocratic" implies that there is a tangible reward for those of the highest skill. That those with more skill will rise higher in an institution. Being able to express a learned skill that you've practiced is not meritocracy
The word “meritocratic” implies that there is a tangible reward for those of the highest skill.
Is the knowledge that you've mastered an incredibly difficult skill and have the ability to paint and draw beautiful pictures not a tangible reward?
Your art is a manifestation of that knowledge, though, so it is tangible in that sense.
No, you've looped your argument back on itself. Your argument is now that your art leads to a tangible reward in the form of your art. You've created a recursive loop, and are have strayed so far away from "art is a meritocracy" that you're arguing what the word "tangible" means. Being this much of a pedant is painful, please just take the L
Your argument is now that your art leads to a tangible reward in the form of your art.
Yes? This was always my position lol. If you do art you get better at art and are rewarded with better art. Unless you're one of those people that thinks a toddler's scribbles are just as meaningful as a Caravaggio. In which case, we simply fundamentally disagree about art and can end the conversation right here.
have strayed so far away from “art is a meritocracy” that you’re arguing what the word “tangible” means
I didn't argue what the word tangible means at all, I just said that art is a tangible manifestation of your ability to create art, unless you're willing to argue that that's not the case? It's ultimately irrelevant because you're getting hung up on a misinterpretation of what I meant when I said art is meritocratic.
I saw a great post describing AI art as essentially "doing orientalism for sentient beings"
Instead of mishmashing widely disparate Asian cultural artifacts together in a vague romanticized setting, it's doing that with Humanity in general. And at a more fundamental level.
Fucking thank you, I hate it so much. Art is a re-presentation of the shared human experience. What the fuck does an ai know about being human? And where is the joy or skill in inputting words into a text field?
I put the prompt "shih tzu toy poodle mix in knight armor, fantasy, realistic, detailed" in my computer. I check it later that day and there's a bunch of cute pictures there as well as a few eldritch horrors where the AI melds a helmet with a dog's head or something. I show my mom the best of the batch and she oohs and ahhs and points out the ones that look like our dog and tries to show them to him although I doubt he can really understand what the heck we're doing. It's fun.
I’m not saying it’s not fun, I’m saying it’s the destruction of the fundamental pillar of ‘what is art?’
People have said the same thing about the camera, computer, etc, but the fundamental difference is that those are tools that are wielded by a creative human mind. AI generated art is wielded by derivative processes that is absent of creativity.
I’m not saying it’s not fun, I’m saying it’s the destruction of the fundamental pillar of ‘what is art?’
and?
You asked where the joy is,I told you where the joy is. Maybe it's not John Singer Sargent or whoever type sublime artistic joy, but it's fun. I always thought about art as "something someone makes that provokes a feeling", and it certainly works under that definition. I doubt that's a very complex way of looking at it, but then again you will never get a concrete answer to "What is art?"
Also kinda pedantic but there is some kind of creativity being employed w/ AI art. At bare minimum, you have to come up with an idea to feed it. Is typing in "epic fantasy battle trending on artstation" particularly creative? No, but neither is drawing the most simplistic stick figure with a line for them to stand on, and technically that's an artistic creation, too.
A simplistic stick figure with a line for them to stand on is inherently creative, whereas nothing an AI generates is. The former is literally employing techniques and processes to bring create something from the human mind, regardless of quality. The latter is devoid of that.
I doubt that’s a very complex way of looking at it, but then again you will never get a concrete answer to “What is art?”
My initial comment literally answered this. Art is a re-presentation of the human experience.
The AI generates nothing without human input. Therefore isn't the user in that case employing a technique and/or process through their inputs, regardless of the medium that input is channeled through?
Your initial comment has a singular definition of art, but unless someone finally figured it all out recently and I've been living under a rock there is no one unifying definition of art that can be used to unambiguously rule what is and is not art. Google "what is art" and you'll find pages of people trying to figure that out and providing varying definitions that can contradict each other. People have been arguing about this forever. There is no definitive art-o-meter that buzzes when you get within five miles of the Louvre.
Eh, there's definitely a right and wrong way of coming up with prompts for the AI to use. It's not like we can just say, "make art that doesn't suck lmao" to the AI and the AI would come up with a completely novel work of art that doesn't suck. As of right now, it still needs human input to guide it. And as long as you still have to game the prompt in order to guide the AI to do what you want it to do, there'll still be artistry within the whole process.
You’re missing the point. You can input text into an ai to spit out art, but what it spits out is inherently devoid of a creative vision. It is choosing from derivative processes to match a text input.
A photographer wields a camera to create a photograph, but the photographer is ultimately the one who creates. A user inputs texts into an AI, but the user does not create and the AI inherently can not create.
How so? The first step that initiates the process is still a human. Going back to your photography example, the photographer has to press a button, which the camera then works its electromechanical magic while the AI artist types a bunch of text and presses enter, which the AI then works its algorithmic magic.
The amount of human labor time needed to produce an AI drawing isn't zero. It's an exceedingly trivial amount compared with actually painting a painting, but it's still not zero.
holy shit I put in almost the exact same prompt, minus the toy poodle part, for my little guy about a month ago
got some REALLY good wizard ones out of it
Aside from the horrors of AI art, I wonder about the cognitive effects of more and more AI being present in our daily lives. For instance, GitHub CoPilot being a thing (in addition to a sneaky way to enclose the commons) means that engineers not thinking things from effectively copy pasted code through is entirely more likely. The way that Google Docs autocompletes text for me - I can’t fucking stand that. I can sense it molding my thought patterns already.
It makes me think of getting a calculator as a kid, and my math skills deteriorating rapidly not long after. Or this paper, showing that navigation tools like Google Maps harms spatial awareness:
The analysis of long-term effects through structural equation modeling showed that spatial aptitudes and accumulated experience of tool use independently affect wayfinding and spatial orientation and that the negative effects of accumulated experience were larger than the positive effects of spatial aptitudes.
Not to sound like old-man-yelling-at-cloud, but when it comes to cognitive offloading I can’t help but feel that doing things like leaning on a bunch of shonky linear algebra for human expression and reasoning is going to have horrendous systemic effects that we can’t predict.
I’ll offer another perspective.
I have schizophrenia and AI art helps me to express my unusual thoughts in a more coherent manner in a way I’m not capable with pencil and paper yet. I can get my perspective across without being frustrated due to lack of skill.
At the moment I am completely absorbed by it. The weird dream logic it has seems like real dream logic and what does that mean for how our brains work? It's fascinating that it creates imperfect ;objects, just like DNA does. It's so interesting as cognitive science.
I've been several different kinds of artist in my life. I don't feel particularly threatened by AI art. At least not on its own. AI is a tool like any other. What makes a tool threatening is not its mere existence, but who wields it, how, and why. Well, there's a bit more to it than that, but for the most part that applies.
I've dabbled with AI too. It's not anywhere close to replacing humans. It might get exponentially better very fast, but it still leaves obvious traces of how it was made. Ultimately it does serve a purpose: to allow an individual to create faster. Rather than replacing the entire artistic process it can be used to churn out rough drafts. Prototypes. Storyboards. It can be used to aid disabled artists. If it pushes anyone out of their job, it's not really the AI that's to blame, but capitalism itself. Because losing a job is only threatening under an economic system that does not make it easy to find a new job, and does not guarantee people what they need to survive.
Also, there's nothing meritocratic about the artistic industry. Especially from the perspective of a writer. The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling class. Art is funded, advertised, and upheld by critics primarily on the basis of how much it reinforces hegemonic ideology. Hamilton for example, might be a well-written, well acted, well choreographed play, but more importantly it is a hagiography of a bourgeois founding father, and it was upheld on that basis more than its merits. You don't get to perform at the white house just because your art is cool. Artistic merit is how the ideology is laundered. It is the secondary consideration of the culture industry. That's why a defense department commercial like Top Gun or a capitalist apologia like Iron Man sells more tickets than something more critical of the system we live under.
"Let me be perfectly clear: AI Art is an affront to humanity. I am not saying this just as an artist who wanted to make a living off of his work - I’ve already accepted that careers and jobs aren’t static." how many weavers felt the same? how many scribes? how many smiths? You're right, it's awful that art is being captured by techno-capital, but I can't agree that it's uniquely bad. It's that technology is being developed using the resources we generated to destroy our livelihoods, destroy our ability to express ourselves, destroy the relationships we share with each other - and this is the way new technology has always affected us under capital. You're also right that there's a decent chance it destroys the market for art, but I disagree that it will destroy appreciation for human-produced art. I can pick up a knitted hat for £5 at the supermarket, but that doesn't erase my appreciation for the one my grandmother knitted for me.
in addition to all the points raised in the comments, I'd like to point out that AI has no actual concept of what it's doing. It's just a program that learns a function from data by doing some math.
Sure, a person might be able to make one single piece of art that looks vaguely like what they want if they finangle with the prompt enough, but what about bigger projects? Art installations, movies, games, etc.? Good luck getting anything cohesive out of AI.
Of course some greedy pigs will try to get away with using only AI, but anyone that has dealt with the tech (and tbh, most machine learning), understands that it's much more useful when paired with a human that can actually make sense of it's output.
anyone that has dealt with the tech (and tbh, most machine learning), understands that it's much more useful when paired with a human that can actually make sense of it's output.
To be fair, this is a different job description entirely. I imagine the role of "tweaker of AI art" is not something a traditional artist would be fulfilled by.
That is a fair assessment. I think traditional artists will still have their place anyway because these models can't really do truly new stuff, and also have biases/ might be unable to do stuff in the way you want, and that will become apparent very quickly.
